Friday, June 26, 2009
Editorial: Preserving America's history
President Obama replaces the man who compiles the record of America's foreign relations.
From the RoundTable blog
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Ph.D.s in history need to work somewhere, and a couple of dozen find employment with the State Department's Office of the Historian. They compile the documentary history of the nation's foreign relations. At least they are supposed to.
In recent years, internal problems and weak leadership have hindered their work. Fortunately, a change in administration might set them back on track.
The historian's office issues volumes in the "Foreign Relations of the United States" series. Those compilations of diplomatic correspondence and documents are a treasure trove for researchers. They contain primary source material from administrations all the way back to Abraham Lincoln and up to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, with more on the way.
It's a little-known office but an essential one for preserving the historical record for future generations.
For example, one can read a memorandum sent to President Kennedy on April 17, 1961, the first day of the Bay of Pigs Invasion. It argued the United States could not recognize the insurrectionists as the government of Cuba if they controlled only a small part of the island.
When George W. Bush became president, he appointed Marc Susser to head the office. He didn't do a good job. A recent inspector general's investigation found that under Susser, there was "serious mismanagement for which the director must be held accountable."
Three-quarters of the office's employees were critical of how Susser ran the office, reporting cronyism and a lack of transparency. Last year, 20 percent of the staff responsible for compiling the volumes resigned.
Even more damning, Susser seemed little interested in publishing thorough, timely reports. Though the office published 57 Nixon-Ford volumes based on 2.5 million classified pages, Susser reportedly wanted to scale it back to 38 volumes for the Reagan administration despite there being 8.5 million classified pages.
It was, no doubt, coincidental that many players in the Bush White House were involved in creating those Reagan records.
All of which points to the need to replace Susser, and that's just what the Obama administration did recently. It reassigned him and appointed John Campbell, a former ambassador to Nigeria, to the job.
The odd thing was that it did so without any public announcement. If Campbell is an improvement, and we hope he is, the administration should trumpet that the nation's history is in good hands again.
